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Nor would it be sound to condemn this Kosmos as less than
beautiful, as less than the noblest possible in the corporeal;
and neither can any charge be laid against its source.
The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of
deliberate purpose: it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its
own likeness by a natural process. And none the less, a second
consideration, if a considered plan brought it into being it
would still be no disgrace to its maker- for it stands a stately
whole, complete within itself, serving at once its own purpose
and that of all its parts which, leading and lesser alike, are of
such a nature as to further the interests of the total. It is,
therefore, impossible to condemn the whole on the merits of the
parts which, besides, must be judged only as they enter
harmoniously or not into the whole, the main consideration, quite
overpassing the members which thus cease to have importance. To
linger about the parts is to condemn not the Kosmos but some
isolated appendage of it; in the entire living Being we fasten
our eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the marvellous spectacle
of the complete Man; we ignore all the tribes and kinds of
animals except for the meanest; we pass over an entire race,
humanity, and bring forward- Thersites.
No: this thing that has come into Being is the Kosmos complete:
do but survey it, and surely this is the pleading you will hear:
I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms
of life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking
nothing: for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant
and every animal, of all the Kinds of created things, and many
Gods and nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy
in their goodness.
And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths
and with living things of every race, and while the very sea has
answered to the power of Soul, do not think that the great air
and the ether and the far-spread heavens remain void of it: there
it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and
into that orderly eternal circuit of the heavens which in its
conscious movement ever about the one Centre, seeking nothing
beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine Mind. And all that is
within me strives towards the Good; and each, to the measure of
its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens depend,
with all my own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part,
and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may
judge inanimate.
But there are degrees of participation: here no more than
Existence, elsewhere Life; and, in Life, sometimes mainly that of
Sensation, higher again that of Reason, finally Life in all its
fullness. We have no right to demand equal powers in the unequal:
the finger is not to be asked to see; there is the eye for that;
a finger has its own business- to be finger and have finger
power.
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